[FIXED] What are the disadvantages of using AWS ELB directly with Gunicorn (no nginx)?

Issue

Typical setups I've found on Google to run a django application on AWS all suggest a setup like

ELB -> nginx -> gunicorn -> django

I was wondering why the nginx part is really needed here? Isn't ELB sufficient as proxy?

In our case, we are running multiple Gunicorn/django instances in individual docker containers on ECS.

Solution

Without Nginx, It would work just fine and you will still be safe from the majority of DDOS attacks that can bring down an exposed gunicorn server.

I can only see Nginx helpful to add to the stack if it'll be serving your static files. However, it's much better to serve your static files by S3 (+ cloudfront as a bonus) since it's has high availability and reliability baked in.

Sources: http://docs.gunicorn.org/en/latest/deploy.html#nginx-configuration https://stackoverflow.com/a/12801140

Answered By - mostafazh

Answer Checked By - Senaida (PHPFixing Volunteer)